“Akheloios can only do so much, and if Circe will not be swayed—child, we have only survived so long as we have because the birds found our island a welcome place to nest. So many winters, I remember. So many winters we lived on little more than eggs and fowl. But tell me, Ligeia, what will we eat this winter, with Circe’s falcons keeping the birds away?”
“She will lose interest in us soon enough, if Aglaope would only stop needling her so,” her mother insisted, making Aglaope flush. Ligeia would never understand her, nor did she seem to realize that the witch’s anger would not be so easily forgotten, as long as it had already lasted. “And Circe will not send her handmaiden out upon a winter sea. They would be just as likely to founder upon our rocks as any other ship in a storm, and provide us with food enough for a moon at least should we find the body before it is washed away. The birds will return then, and roost, and we will live another season on their eggs and meager flesh, you’ll see.”
“I pray that you are right, my dear. Truly. But better to prepare ourselves for the worst, do you not think? And better still not to scold your daughter for speaking aloud what we all wish for.”
Ligeia sighed. “She will only be disappointed, Mother. And you should not encourage these dreams of hers with your storytelling. Butes-Akheloios was a fine man, and in a time of plenty, it is all well and good to let such a man sail away to make his name. But a swollen belly is not the only gift Akheloios gives by the men he brings us, and I fear she will not have the will to do what she must, should the body of her lover come back to us.”
“If she is hungry enough, she will accept the nourishment that is given, regardless of its source,” Thelxiope said. “As she has done before. As we all have done, in our time. She has not balked before.”
“It was not her child, of her body. Nor was it her lover, upon whom we feasted. You do not tell her the whole truth of our circumstance, only of the joy and pleasure.”
But Aglaope had heard enough, her skin prickling with anger. As if she did not know! As if she had not lived upon her own sister’s flesh! She strode forward from her shadowed niche, and Ligeia fell silent at once, her gaze flicking away and her face flushing red.
“You are not wrong, Mother,” Aglaope said. “I will not do what has always been done. I will not blithely accept my fate, exiled upon these rocks, and I will not sit by and wait in the hope that Circe will tire of starving us. I will leave, when the opportunity comes. And if that means it is my body that washes back, bloated and rotten, my flesh all that is left for you to eat, then so be it. As you have said a thousand times before, why should I worry? In death I will be by our goddess’s side. In death, perhaps, I will even fly.”
And she left them, climbing back up to her nest atop the spire to spend the night, where she could dream and hope and pray out from beneath her mother’s sharp eye.
Ligeia wanted to keep faith, and that was all well and good. But it seemed to Aglaope that it was far more likely the gods would help them more if they did what they could to help themselves as well. Perhaps it was because they had not acted, in all these years, which had kept them in this miserable place.
Seven days passed without Circe’s falcons circling above her head, and Aglaope sang to the seabirds, who were still too wary to settle upon the rocks, praying to the gods that they would calm before Anthousa might return. In truth, she spent more time upon the spire in her nest than she did below, avoiding Ligeia as much as she could, though it meant in large part spurning her grandmother as well.
But Thelxiope seemed to shrivel more with every day that passed, her skin dry and wrinkled, thin and delicate as onion peel. It would be too late for her, Aglaope feared. Far too late before the seabirds calmed enough to roost and brood, and they had eggs to thicken their broth and seaweed soup.
“Do not fret,” Thelxiope said, when she joined her for their evening meal—though there was little left to share. “When I am gone, my body will strengthen yours. It will be enough to see you through the winter, I hope, even if Circe’s falcons scare the birds away.”
“I wish you would not speak so,” Aglaope said, blinking back the pressure behind her eyes—she was far too thirsty to waste what water they had on tears. “I need your spirit, not your body. Your love and your support, when Mother will not listen.”
“You are old enough now, dear girl, that you will make her listen when it is needful,” Thelxiope said. “And no matter what she says, or how she argues, it is your strength that supports her. Your voice upon which she relies.”
“She does not care,” Aglaope said. “To her, it does not matter if we live or die.”
“It is what she tells herself to quiet her fears, that’s true, but not what she feels inside. You are old enough to realize that, too, surely.”
Aglaope tucked the furs more closely around her grandmother’s shoulders. “We need you.”
“You need food,” Thelxiope said. “And with one less mouth to feed, it will stretch all the further.”
She hated knowing it was true—hated herself for having already thought it, too. “I wish you had sailed away with Butes-Akheloios,” she said instead. “I wish you were lying in a soft, rope-strung bed, fleeces piled beneath you a handspan thick, with maids to see to your every need, your every breath.”
“Perhaps I will see him again, yet,” her grandmother said, chuckling softly. “But there is no knowing that I would have ever had the rest, even if I had gone with him across the water to his rich lands. I might just as easily have died upon the sea, or in childbirth after the strain of such a journey.”
Aglaope snorted. “Strain! What do those women with their full bellies and blazing fires know of strain? You’d have put them all to shame with your strength, your endurance.”
“Until I became fat and happy, or even sick from so much strange food.”
“Sick upon food!” Aglaope smiled. “Surely it is not possible. Not for a Siren, used to corpses and carrion and rot.”
“It would be the honey, I’m certain. You know they douse their fruits and nuts in it, until it is dripping with sticky sweetness, or so I have heard.”
“They would not force you to eat it, though,” she said. “When there are so many options, so much to choose from—surely they do not eat everything presented at every feast.”
“Perhaps they do! Though how their men stay so trim upon their ships, I cannot imagine if it is so. You must promise me that you will, though. That you will taste every flavor of every dish that is set before you, until you are all curves and softness, without a bone in sight.”
Aglaope laughed, feeling lighter for the teasing. “I swear it upon the Styx, my most solemn vow. I will never turn a cup or bowl away, should I find myself at such a banquet. And my children, too, will be as plump and round as I can make them.”
“That is a fine thought,” Thelxiope said, closing her eyes. “A very fine thought indeed.”